A View from the Inside...

brat and I went out to dinner tonight, and I subjected her to yet another tirade about the boy, overanalyzing some of his recent comments and actions. I pouted, I cried, I whined, and she said to me, "Enough." She told me the patterns she saw in my relationship with him, the repetition of the same pain, the same hurt, the same conversation over and over again. She showed me my relationship with him in a way I never could have, because I can't step away and view my interactions the way she can. She's on the inside, but at the same time she has a distance that I don't in understanding the things we (the boy and I) do to each other. She made me realize that he almost never *means* to hurt me, that it's just his way of being in the world that so often does, unfortunately, leave me in tears. I know I can't change him, I can only change me, and my relationship to him.
So brat gave me advice, and finished with, "But this is only my opinion. You have to make your own decision." And she's right- as much as she is involved, this is my relationship, separate than the one between the three of us, and the two of them.
It may be a difficult clarity, in many ways an unwelcome one, but I thank her nonetheless.